GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) showed narrow ribbons of fog over the northwestern portion of Lake Superior on 08 July 2019. A person attempting to navigate from Grand Portage, Minnesota — located northeast of Grand Marais Airport, identifier KCKC — to Isle Royale became lost in the fog and eventually ran out of fuel (media story).

Possibly compounding the fog-related visibility problem, GOES-16 Natural Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images (below) revealed that dense smoke from Canadian wildfires was lingering and also recirculating slowly northward across Lake Superior; this smoke occasionally reduced the surface visibility to 4 miles at Houghton, Michigan (identifier KCMX).

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GOES-16 (GOES-East) True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images from the AOS site (above) showed the signature of dense smoke from Canadian wildfires that was being transported southward across parts of the Upper Midwest on 06 July 2019. While much of the smoke remained aloft, some of it was reaching the surface and restricting the visibility at locations such as International Falls, Baudette and Thief River Falls in northern Minnesota and Fargo in eastern North Dakota.

On the following day, the smoke settled farther southward over Wisconsin and Michigan (below). Much of the smoke again remained aloft, but continued to persist within the boundary layer at Baudette and International Falls — and it did briefly restrict the surface visibility at Green Bay in northeastern Wisconsin.

===== 08 July Update =====

On 08 July the smoke covered much of the Great Lakes and parts of adjacent states (above).

===== 09 July Update =====

On 09 July, a gradual decreasing trend in the areal coverage and density of smoke over the Great Lakes was seen (above). A Suomi NPP VIIRS True Color RGB image acquired and processed by the CIMSS/SSEC Direct Broadcast ground station (below) showed that some of the smoke had moved over the Mid-Atlantic states and out across the adjacent offshore waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

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GOES-16 (GOES-East) Near-Infrared “Snow/Ice” (1.61 µm), Near-Infrared “Cloud Particle Size” (2.24 µm) and Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images (above) revealed nighttime thermal signatures of a fire at a Jim Beam bourbon warehouse in Versailles, Kentucky on 03 July 2019. The fire reportedly began to burn around 0330 UTC (11:30 PM EDT on 02 July); it was thought that the fire may have been started by a lightning strike — and GOES-16 GLM Groups did indeed portray lightning activity associated with thunderstorms that were dissipating over the area around that time.

The nighttime thermal signatures seen on near-infrared 1.61 µm and 2.24 µm images (brighter white pixels) result from the fact that those two ABI spectral bands are located close to the peak emitted radiance of very hot features such as volcanic eruptions or large fires (below).

The fire continued burning during the day — although it was frequently cloudy, the hot 3.9 µm thermal signature (darker red pixels) was apparent through occasional breaks in the cloud cover (below).

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A total solar eclipse occurred across the southern Pacific Ocean and parts of South America on 02 July 2019 — GOES-17 (GOES-West) “stretched” True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images (above) showed the eastward progression of the eclipse shadow.

On the view from GOES-16 (GOES-East), the eclipse shadow can be seen beginning to move across South America just before sunset (below). Grayscale GOES-16 Infrared imagery is displayed where there is not enough (or there is no) sunlight to use any of the ABI Visible and Near-Infrared spectral bands for RGB imagery.

Full Disk GOES-17 and GOES-16 True Color RGB imagery combined and displayed in a Mollweide projection is shown below (courtesy of Rick Kohrs, SSEC).

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